Saturday, 22 December 2018

So
what were the stand-out performances of 2018 in Manchester and the North West? Here’s
a personal selection.

Buxton Festival provided
some of the best experiences in opera – their production of Verdi’s early
opera, Alzira, was the third to be
directed for them by Elisha Moshinsky and proved a fascination, with a
concision of construction and kaleidoscopic variety of mood almost akin to
fast-cut movie direction. There were some thundering good tunes plus
shock-horror moments from Verdi, and Stephen Barlow conducted it as his swan
song, operatically, for the festival, as he left its artistic directorship this
year.

Opera della Luna
provided comic balance to that with a great modernization of The Daughter of the Regiment (Donizetti).
Who would have thought it would translate to the world of a desert-based Harley-riding
biker gang in California, USA? They had a tenor with all the top Cs, too, in Jesús
Álvarez.

And
the festival offering from early music specialists La Serenissima was Tisbe –
the story we know better from Shakespeare’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream as Pyramus and Thisbe – by Giuseppe Antonio
Brescianello. It was a most lamentable comedy … or should that be comical lament
… in Mark Burns’ production, full of inventiveness and humour.

That’s
not to discount the sheer heavyweight brilliance of Opera North. New productions that came our way this year included
one of Un Ballo in Maschera (Verdi), where
Tim Albery’s direction let the music do the histrionics (and it did under Richard
Farnes’ baton), and a new Tosca (Puccini),
where Giselle Allen made the heroine both an extrovert and insecure beneath it –
so her jealousy was a weakness and fully part of her personality – in masterly
style.

I
should also mention Clonter Opera’s La Bohème, with its very talented young
stars-in-the-making and a clever production by Harry Fehr; the Royal Northern College of Music’s Hansel and Gretel, in which designer
Yannis Thavoris achieved several remarkable coups de theatre; and the premiere
of Adam Gorb’s outstanding theatre work,
The Path to Heaven, with libretto by
Ben Kaye, a kind of opera documentary on true stories from the Holocaust.

This
was the year in which the BBC
Philharmonic said goodbye to one chief conductor – Juanjo Mena – with a
fiesta of Spanish music, and introduced us to his successor – Omer Meir Welber (albeit
that he doesn’t start officially until next summer) – with an hour of Wagner in
October.

The
Philharmonic’s spring programmes included the world premiere of Mark Simpson’s new Cello concerto, played byLeonard
Elschenbroich with skill and passion under the baton of Clemens Schuld, a work
I think may find a permanent niche.

And
there were two exciting events in two days at the still-new Stoller Hall in
Chetham’s School of Music, as contemporary music group Psappha and the more middle-of-the-road Northern Chamber Orchestra each opened their autumn season quite
memorably: in Psappha’s case with Kurtág’s Scenes
from a Novel, performed by Gillian Keith with film of dancer Rosanna
Reberio, making it as much music theatre as concert; and in the NCO’s case with
Freddy Kempf playing Beethoven’s Piano
Concerto no. 3, which lit up the evening.

Three
other concerts made 2018 a special year for me: Manchester Collective’s June outing at the Stoller Hall, which included
Kurtag, Cage, Prokoviev, Janáček, Pärt and Messiaen and showed how to do
imaginative programming and advocacy for the unusual combined with top quality
musicianship; the lively, community-linked Manchester
Peace Song Cycle, heard at the RNCM and written by a team of women composers
inspired by Caroline Clegg to tell the
story of Heaton Park in war and peace; and English
Touring Opera’s St Matthew Passion
at the Stoller Hall – not strictly an opera performance but not merely a
concert one either, and in conception and execution completely absorbing and
moving.

Issued earlier this year, the recording of Sir Mark and the
Hallé’s Bridgewater Hall performance from late 2016 is the third in their
complete Ring cycle – Siegfried was performed and recorded in June, so the
whole set is now in the can.

I was in the hall that November night and I can tell you
it was fantastic. It was a
magisterial account of the score – done in one continuous take of
two-and-three-quarter hours – with some beautifully characterised accounts of
individual roles, opulent orchestral sound, smoothness and precision from the
strings led by Lyn Fletcher, and resplendent brass.

(There was much more to it than that, as this performance
was effectively semi-staged, but only those who were there will have had its
benefit – never mind: the sound alone is brilliant). The line-up was enviable
and full of character: Sarah
Tynan, Madeleine Shaw and Leah Marian-Jones as the Rhinemaidens, Samuel Youn as
Alberich, Iain Paterson as Wotan (interestingly self-aware at first, but
growing in grandeur), a regal Susan Bickley as Fricka, Reinhard Hagen an
appealingly naïve Fasolt and Clive Bayley his meaner, nastier brother, Will
Hartmann an intriguing, near-lyrical Loge, and Susanne Resmark almost
other-worldly in the richness and fullness of her Erda, among them.

I wrote about this recording when it appeared in August,
and it should be a must for all students of Manchester’s musical history and our
English operatic past. The Theatre Royal in Peter Street – long closed for
stage performances – was for many years the city’s home for top-class drama and
opera, and in 1854 Charles Hallé collaborated with the composer and conductor Edward
Loder on one of the most ambitious opera seasons the city has ever known,
before or since. They gathered a company of top international operatic singers,
and Loder brought to completion the opera that has since been described as his
‘masterpiece’ – Raymond and Agnes.
It’s a Romantic work in ‘gothic’ style, and Loder thought he was writing for
soloists of exceptional gifts (sadly, its premiere was delayed until summer
1855, and a much weaker cast was then the best available).

But Raymond and
Agnes is still the only serious opera of real merit ever to have been composed,
rehearsed and premiered in the North West of England, and Loder at his
best is a very good dramatic composer indeed. This complete recording is of the
later London version – the only one whose score survives – but there’s some
remarkable music in it.

This is a little gem of a disc. The pieces are Elgar in
light-weight mood, but often with touches of the depth and imagination found in
his bigger, more serious music, and in The
Wand of Youth suites, and even the Nursery
Suite, you hear echoes of the atmospheres of some of the Enigma Variations, and other works. The Hallé
play superbly and charmingly, with Sir Mark Elder adept at drawing every beauty
from the scores, and you couldn’t look for anything better for some relaxed
post-Christmas enjoyment.

For students of Manchester’s musical heritage (and all
Haslingden-izens, where the birthplace of Alan Rawsthorne is marked by a blue
plaque), this collection is a must. Part of it is a re-issue from an earlier
ASC collection – the Oboe Concerto, Quartet for oboe, violin, viola and cello,
and Studies on a Theme by Bach for
string trio – and the first of those (written in 1947) is a lovely work
(originally premiered by Evelyn Rothwell with the Hallé). The bonus now is the Clarinet Concerto, played by RNCM
principal Linda Merrick, which is a pre-war composition and angst-ridden, as much
of that era’s music was. Its manuscript is in the RNCM library, and there are
two possible endings, as the composer recorded an alternative version to his original
(with Thea King) that sounds much better and has been reconstructed: here,
thanks to the wonders of technology, you can choose which you prefer. There’s
also the Cello Sonata of 1948, one of
his greatest pieces, and a setting of Brother
James’s Air, with which it has some thematic connections, plus a two-recorders-and-lute
tune written for an RSC production of Hamlet.